Cécile Godde: Principal Research Scientist

Dr Cécile Godde is a Food Systems Research Scientist with CSIRO Agriculture and Food and is based in Brisbane, Australia. She is passionate about the challenges in relation to food security, food sustainability, supply chain resilience, and global change, at the farm level as well as in a national and global context.

Cecile’s most recent project leadership includes the FoodShed project, a project that combines novel conceptual frameworks, stakeholder engagement, and domain modelling expertise, including natural language processing, to support our collective understanding of the complex dynamics in the foodsheds of urban consumers.

She also leads a new project that aims at better understanding the “True Cost” of the Australian food system, when accounting for costs and benefits not reflected in market prices, such as food waste, biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions, or malnutrition due to unhealthy diets.

In 2021-2022, Cécile led the CSIRO team of the DARPA World Modelers Program. The CSIRO team leveraged biophysical crop and rangeland modelling, household bio-economic agent-based modelling, and supply chain transport logistics modelling capabilities to analyse questions relevant to national and global security.

Cécile’s research on the role of local dynamics in shaping food systems, as well as her growing focus on True Cost Accounting as a powerful tool to communicate system performance, supports Food System Horizons’ transformation objectives related to policy and practice change.   

Prior to joining CSIRO, Cécile acquired other international experiences working on conservation and sustainable agricultural development projects for the non-governmental organisation Greening Australia (Australia), the International Livestock Research Institute (Costa-Rica), the multinational MARS Inc. (Brazil) and the French governmental agency for organic agriculture-Agence BIO (France).

In 2018, Cécile was awarded the Queensland Government Women in STEM prize, the CSIRO Directors Award, the University of Queensland Postgraduate Student for the Year and The Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation Excellence Award, in recognition of her research and advocacy for diversity leadership and gender equity.

Outside work, Cécile enjoys spending time outdoor, growing Australian natives, and hiking.

Follow Cécile’s research on Google Scholar, ResearchGate, LinkedIn, and Twitter.